A Marvelous Sky

Last weekend I played once again in a band just for one gig.

And only one song.

It's a real simple basic tune that I took on – The Long Winters' 'Sky Is Open.'

You can hear their original version on YouTube.

No one over here knows this song; it's never been played on the radio here.

What I like about the tune and the way The Long Winters perform it is the clear vocals and the fairly standard English diction of the singer in spite of a touch of Canadian accent in there.

I've more or less lost most of my Ultra-British accent that I grew up with, having lived in Australasia for quite a few years now. I think I'll have to remedy that though, as modern Australian/Australasian is a peculiar, clipped, slack-dictioned, sorry thing... Well I think so.

New PRS Guitar

The guitar part in the song is also extremely easy to play. Now I can manage a pretty difficult range of techniques on this instrument – in fact my Dad called me Paganini all the way up from a small child and I think he thought that like him (that is, my old man, not Paganini!) I might one day take up the violin properly. But I never did. I think though at some point he may have thought I really was Paganini too. Who knows, I may have been in a former life. But I am not now and I don't play publicly anymore although at one time I played in ski resorts all over Austria with fairly big-time professional session and side musos who ski-ed off-tour and played in the nightclubs apres ski.

I'll tell you how good I was – I played joint lead guitar in a jazz band whose drummer, Glenn Walsh, went on to hit the skins on tour for Stevie Wonder in Sydney. There ya go.

Anyhow... 'The Sky Is Open,' is a song currently being considered as the theme for a potential Hollywood big budget flick featuring Marvel's Ms. Marvel. I don't think it'll ever get made though. They've even slated the tremendous New Zealand director Mike Takahori or whatever his name is (he directed the last of the good Bond movies Die Another Day). Ms. Marvel is riddled with complications as far as sexuality and a dark comic book history that won't go away no matter how much spinning goes down the marketing tunnel here.

Me, I'm happy to lust over a new Pernambuco-necked, Maple-topped, PRS guitar, play tunes just for my own self-indulgence, and think about whether it would be fun getting a Sunbeam Alpine or Tiger from somewhere and fully restoring it. This was the first car James Bond ever drove in the movies by the way. But you already know that.

Charlize Theron CANNOT play Ms. M.

Madonna... Could. You mightn't think so but if you go back to her being directed by Traktor Films in the video clip of the song Die Another Day you realize just how amazingly good at action pieces she really is.

Hollywood will likely screw up this job just like it has everything else recently. Even Julia Roberts could do this role. But not, NOT Charlize Theron.

All these people getting too old? No, I don't think so. Hollywood can halt time. Shame it just can't go back to when there were real producers there though.

The Art Of Modern Finance

I can't say this is new to me; I have encountered it many times before, especially during the late Eighties and early Nineties, when I worked for a brilliant Sydney Merchant Banker by the name of Jurisic long since retired. There were a lot of brilliant people around the place in those days: I recall one of the most fascinating individuals I have ever met - Karl Teuchert - the woodcraftsman and designer who designed a large amount of the furniture on which Federal Senators in Australia sit. He was a man full of energy and passion and extremely generous with his knowledge of materials to all those who sought him out. Karl worked almost exclusively with an Australian hardwood known as Jarrah, which is similar to the rare and expensive American Cocobolo.

But I digress – slightly.

A beautiful pic unconnected to the gun debate

I am driving at making the point that today it is extremely rare to find someone, anyone -, who, knowing a great deal about their subject matter, will care to divulge a lot of that knowledge fluidly.

It is simply far too difficult to keep the commercial value of any specialised knowledge intact once that knowledge is allowed to drift unescorted out 'into the wild' as it were.

The banker Jurisic owned a small boutique investments house, and Teuchert owned two fairly large craft workshops in which he employed about thirty highly talented craftspeople. Both of them could supply virtually completely unique products to a high-end and individualistic market that was not able to source the same things elsewhere. And, more to the point, this 'high-end' market was not prepared at the time to be satisfied with substitutes of a lesser quality and standard.

One just has to say, however, that it is now moot if the China market produces knock-offs of a lesser quality anymore. Sad to say but true, Chinese film directors make substantially better movies than anyone in Hollywood, e-Readers are cheaper and better if you buy them from the back-alleys in Hong Kong, and space shots launched from inside China are safer than anything Morton Thiokol or TRW ever did. This will not last. But it might go on for a thousand years yet before 'it doesn't last,' if you gather what I mean.

Anyway, back to my first sentence. I recently had the experience, once again, of watching a group of intelligent people turn to water in the face of the serious prospect of actually making big money now. Far easier, apparently, was it for them to spend a lot of money going around the whole world visiting people in high places just to hear those mysterious 'yes, yes, yesses,' which really meant 'no.' Unlike the Eighties though, today, there is only the one single rare diamond that you will find once in your lifetime, rather than being able to walk up the road a little ways to cast an unhurried eye over all the other diamonds singing much similar tunes. And the one single rare diamond has forsooth even a spirit being within, which moves and lives and thinks – just like those fabled stones in the Garden of Aladdin.

To possess such a stone one must employ a young thin lad, who can easily fit down that Underworld Entrance through which no fat, well-fed and watered, modern Middle Class merchant can go.

There is much in that sentence, no doubt, and it is by no means a terminal statement. But what is absolutely certain, and sure, and true, is that the means and the mechanisms and pathways to financing, of both the high and of the low kind, may be found quite possibly only in the minds of strange sorcerers claiming to be the long lost brother of your lately deceased and much beloved father... The thrill and the magic of financing important things is – and quite possibly always has been – a secret knowledge, and an art.

Back when I was a callow youth (never was exactly that, though), then, and even now, there is this strange holiness and religiosity about finance that many many people have; it is a thing which is given to you apparently, and to you alone, especially, and above many others, because you are worthy, and you do things in a certain prescribed way that others do not. It is in so many ways a blessing adorning the worthy alone, by the gods of money.

Whereas of course it is not anything of those things. It is simply a person knowing where money is and where it flows inside a dark cavern into which few go and thus where one might still get some before a thousand hungry gnats swarm in to steal it all and to make of yet another cool and fertile place an arid desert patch. As they do. And I fear that those who are survivors in arid places are symbiotic creatures of those gnats. They seem to be in every place that has a want of necessary and adequate funding. And to me, at least, they seem to have a special relationship with gnats.

Dancing With The Sparks Of Light

This is about money, believe it or not.

And I should not be sidetracked...

But I must stop briefly and just note the odd usage of the word 'parabellum' by those philosophers of the gun around the place seemingly everywhere. I'm pretty certain 'parabellum' means 'prepare for war' in Latin. And, I also think that what it implied was a type of cheap and small round of which vast numbers thereof could be quickly manufactured, in preparation for war, where one might be expected to have to possess, and also to carry, a lot of bullets, that don't necessarily weigh a ton, and that you might also easily fire off in large numbers.

A lot of people I have heard speak recently, seem to think a 9 mm parabellum is some special kind of advanced, especially killing sort of cartridge to be used in semi-automatic pistols. Whatever. Any kind of projectile launched at a vicious speed into a human body in the wrong place can kill. Lots of things can kill.

Anyway, I actually don't want to focus on guns and bullets at the moment. However I make the point that people use words and many times what they mean, is not uniformally understood as entirely meaning the same thing as what they think they are communicating to their listeners...

Conceptions of value and wealth and luxury private material possessions are also nowhere nearly as clearcut 'uniformally defined' as we sometimes take for granted that they are.

Yes, the power or the ability to select from many choices is seemingly universally accepted as a freedom that money and wealth renders to an individual. It is of course nullified by sheer ignorance or lack of culture and lack of a wide knowledge about what things exist: people can only choose from that of which they possess some knowledge. Out of sight, out of mind; out of mind, out of any reason to be desired.



Great Car Art - even Ferrari thinks so...

I look at some modern cars around now and they seem to me excessively convolluted, even for admittedly advanced intricate machinery. A friend of mine just told me today that he found the new Black Series C63 Mercedes annoying and utterly unfunctional for driving long distances in Australia along the major outback highways.

On the one hand it may appear that electronically-fuel injected and/or turbo charged, drive-by-wire, motion sensing suspension equipped, hi-tech modern cars with alloy and ceramic engines beat the hell out of a handcrafted Aston V-8, or a Jaguar V-12 with its double bank of Weber carburettors that need to be tuned regularly... On the other hand, the obscurity of what is going on inside the hood of the car, and the shelf-life of all these modern offerings coming from over-capitalized robotic manufacturing plants in Germany, means that none of it is on the human scale anymore. It's all very – maybe too far - removed from the human physicality of sticking a hand-crank into the front of an Austin or old Ford and firing the thing 'into life.' Not that I'm saying we need to go back to all that, but the physical link to the human body/mind creature is essentially lost when it comes to modern things like cars and even buildings and city planning and art and design. And especially communication. I can still use a leaf of hand-filled deckled edge french linen paper to write a note to someone using a pen and ink – but then, nowadays would that person be able to read it and 'get the message?'

Possibly not.

And then again, I would like to be able to wear an Italian rapier on my hip more or less like an accoutrement (of clothing) when going around in public but such a thing is not legal to do, more's the pity. And by what I mean by 'more's the pity' I mean that, such a thing being illegal in my location of residence where there is no right to bear arms or to have any kind of actual or legal freedom of self-expression, it gives the general public no clue, sign, or warning as to how dangerous a person can be with words alone. I'm a dilletante when it comes to it, and I'm sure that specialized guns do a lot more damage than less-specialized ones might do, but I'm equally sure that the process of the damage and the killing begins earlier on than the moment of simply sticking the cartridge into the clip or the chamber. It begins with words. It begins with the ways in which social communication is carried on. The ideas are the seeds, and the words are the physical beginnings of actions springing from the ideas. Words – are absolutely the physically, and really, deadliest things there are.

 

Calvin J. Bear